Racing the New Buggy as Men's A-team

[Zatchmo]

We had the same problem with Kami last year.

Oh, I must have missed you there...

[Elmo Zoneball]

Are there any buggy gnomes out there with historical freeroll times? I'm curious what Spirit Men's A rolled first day in '98 for, like, historical perspective purposes and stuff.

I don't have that year available, but I do have some data for the period of '91 thru '94.

Note: I use "proprietary" timing marks that are not used by other orgs (AFAIK), so the only comparison that can be made is within my timing system, or differences between two vehicles timed in my system.

[lemuroid]

the choices offered are too freeroll centric. if you change the criteria to include some measure of total course time in place of freeroll ( i.e. account for both the push and the roll), then D is a good choice

Freeroll centric for a reason... If you follow the board you may know I tend to rant about teams 'saving speed' for raceday, meaning they are rolling buggies on that day faster than their drivers are ready for, creating an 'unsafe condition'.

My reply assumed that the person making the choice has gotten the buggies in question up to speed and thus was making an objective decision. If you have not gotten the buggy up to speed, then you are just guessing about it's performance. Several of the choices you offered make no sense in that context. My point was that performance over the entire course is what matters in making the choice.

[TommyK]

At some point, a driver is going to go faster than she ever has before. How is it any less safe if that happens on raceday, than if it happens on truck weekend, or even before? The only difference is that you can't place if you crash on raceday, the buggies that might crash into you belong to another team rather than your own, and there's a bigger audience. At least there's only going to be at most two buggies behind you.

Shafeeq?! That's the most callous thing I've ever heard you say ... it's less of a problem these days as teams are putting up fast times during freerolls with most dropping less than 2 seconds on raceday ... heck, last weekends time's (was it really 20 degrees out?) had a number of rolls faster than most racedays in the 90's. Some of the data I've seen from years past was showing some teams going 6-8 secs faster (freeroll only) than truck weekend, which is way sketch and not as lemuroid says 'up to speed'.

The best argument for the 'practice for race conditions by practicing in race conditions' might be the example Beta showed us in 2005 by not souping til raceday only to find it turned their new rubber into a butter like substance.